Kickstarter - Year of the Games

Last week, the projects Reaper Miniature Bones and Planetary Annihilation became the 10th and 11th projects that crossed the Kickstarter line of $ 1 million. Both of these projects are related to the Games section. Seven of the eleven projects that scored more than $ 1M this year are games , and the eighth is a game comic book .
This is the year of the Kickstarter games.



In 2012, more money was invested in games than anything else. Here is a list of the leading sections on the money contributed for the year, as of August 31, 2012:
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1. Games - $ 50 million
2. Film - $ 42 million
3. Design - $ 40 million
4. Music - $ 25 million
5. Technology - $ 16 million

In 2012, the section of the game, according to the collected funding for the entire history of the kickstarter, moved from eighth to second place. The amount of money collected on games by year:

2009 - $ 48,190
2010 - $ 519,885
2011 - $ 3,615,841
2012 - $ 50,330,275





This year, 23% of all money was invested in games. Last year, this figure was only 3.6%. Of the 36 projects that scored more than 500 thousand dollars - 20 were games.

Why now?

The growth catalyst appeared in February, when Double Fine Adventure won $ 1M dollars in the first 24 hours. From this point on, the game development world looked at Kickstarter quite differently. Double Fine showed developers that they can use Kickstarter to do what they previously thought was impossible: create the game they want without external intervention.

You can see the impact of Double Fine on the number of projects launched per month starting in February:



Gamers also paid attention to this: they are the most frequent contributors to Kickstarter. People who invest in game projects, invested an average of 2.43 projects, whereas for all other contributors, the average value of 1.78 projects. Game projects brought more contributors who inspired more game projects, which brought even more contributors, etc.

As you can see below, this cycle creates more dollars invested in games per month ($ 7M after Double Fine) than the previous three years together ($ 4M).

Board and Computer Games

The Games section includes two subsections: Board & Card Games and Video Games , and we can split the numbers according to them. A lot of attention is focused on computer games, but in the section of board games there is also a lot of growth.

Here is a graph showing the money invested in these subsections per year:


Computer games bypass the board games by the amount of money invested, however, the diametrically opposite situation is observed in the number of projects that successfully raised funding.

Projects successfully collected funding by month:


The number of successful projects with board games is 47%, while for computer games this number is only 27%. Computer games raise more money - a project that successfully collects funding on average receives $ 96,000, but board games receive funding more often, although usually at a smaller amount.

Kickstarter and Games

How Games give players the opportunity to take control of themselves and decide what happens. So Kickstarter gives investors the opportunity to take control of their own hands and decide what will happen. The Kickstarter + Games combination has created a series of memorable events. Surprisingly, all this happened six months after the launch of Double Fine Adventure. And despite the fact that so far too little time has passed to see the scale of what is happening, it is quite clear that there are big changes in the world of games.